How it started
It started in Argentina. We did not move there for raves, it just happened. Then we ended up on a dancefloor in Buenos Aires and realised that until then we had been going to discos, not to raves.
The difference was not the music or the sound. The difference was the people. There a stranger turns to you and smiles for no reason. A stranger hands you water, fans you, hugs you if he sees you are tense, and moves on. Nobody is sizing up how you look or how old you are. Everyone came for the same thing, and you feel it within the first half hour.
It turned out a rave works nothing like it looks from outside. The first two or three hours are usually hard: the beat is flat, nothing happens, your thoughts crowd in and you want to leave. That is exactly where most people give up. And then comes the moment when the body stops resisting, you close your eyes, and the next ten hours pass as one. No alcohol, nothing else, just the music.
Other countries followed. Brazil with its garage and beach parties, Georgia with the strict door at Bassiani and its raw hypnotic techno, Turkey, Egypt with the pyramids. The scenes differ: somewhere people are open and dance with each other, somewhere everyone stays inside their own bubble, and that is fine too. There is no single right way. There are different ways, and each person finds their own.
Our friends kept asking the same questions on repeat: what to wear, what to bring, why it is boring at first, how to dance at all, what to do with your head. We got tired of answering in voice notes and wrote the manifesto instead. Then we added the listings, because the second question was always the same: where to go next.
That is how this site appeared. We want people to skip the three years it can take to reach a state you could reach on your first night, if someone explains it and nobody leaves you alone in a foreign country.